Gerudo males appear with curious regularity for millennia. Thanks to the meticulous historical records of the Gerudo healers, we can say with great confidence that such births took place once every hundred years, and never twice within the same generation. But equally curious is their total disappearance in the last five centuries. Some believe this change to be magic's natural punishment for the sins of the race. Others suspect darker truths…
Bozai the Swift, Secrets of Gerudo Medicine
The first hours of an infant's life are a rush of noise, demands, and hormones. The small space of their tent thrilled with energy. The woman had her full awareness, she knew, because she had been trained in some basic practices of healing (although it was never her forte) and recognized the chosen rituals. The midwife had been obviously skilled, as was apparent from her deft and practiced movements, and above all from the singing harmony of her magic. The woman could trust that magic to keep her alert enough to care for the newborn babe, as it had kept her alert for her final labors and for her delivery. She drew strength from it.
How then could she explain what was held in her arms? Because the features—the skin's rich brown caramel, the few hairs' deep crimson—were unmistakably Gerudo. And yet the child was unmistakably a boy. His mother had heard the rumors, of course, the legends. The past glories of their people. Conspiracies of secret villages, far beyond the leviathan bones, hidden by wind and sand, where such marvels were commonplace. She had naturally seen no sign of any such thing, not in any of her wide travels, had dismissed the rumors as the hearsay they were, and unquestioningly expected to teach her daughter as she had been taught by her mother. The child in her arms was a complication. She would have to think about her next moves carefully. Before anything else, though, she would nurse the babe and watch its sleep.
The mother was as well aware of what she faced as any who had not yet borne her first. Many Gerudo children are raised in trust. For some, that is among friends and relatives, with the parent reporting back to some far-flung garrison. Others are passed around the tents of a campfire on patrol, and others still are simply shared among the people of the town. So the child was not the first babe to cradle in the mother's arms. Nor was she without the casual wisdom that was constantly in the air among her people, which explained the common mistakes of inexperience and the best practices of tradition. The mother also took guidance from the magic she had learned, which allowed her insight into the child's health and needs. She took the same from the natural promptings of bodily instinct. Through it all she felt the stirrings of that famously unique joy of motherhood, knowing that this particular joy would differ not only from all her own previous experience, but also from anything in the poems she had memorized in school, or in the stories she had heard from her friends and fellows over the years.
The child was too strange for that. The mother knew that she had encountered an exception. What that exception entailed, she could only begin to guess. Was this the blessing of magic? A medical accident or anomaly? An omen from the goddess, for good or ill? How wide might that omen spread? To herself? Her child? Her people? Her kingdom? These impossible questions surged in her mind no matter how much she might have wished to focus her complete attention on those first firsts of the boy's life. Another possibility occurred as well. What if she was less exceptional than it seemed? Could those rumors and legends hold a grain of truth? It was said that Gerudo Kings once ruled the desert from a great city built upon an oasis. It was said that Gerudo boys had been seen in the furthest reaches of the desert world she knew. She had never met such a being. But then, had she met every Gerudo child? Attended at every childbirth? She had simply accepted the dogma, that she would bear, as all others bore, a treasured vai. Now she held a Gerudo voe in her arms, she had no choice but to wonder how much sense it made for her to be absolutely unique. Then, if she was not the first or only, what had happened to the others?
These thoughts occupied the new mother's mind in the earliest days of her son's life. She was not much closer to answering a single one of them when she was graced with visitors. This visit came as no surprise to the mother. She was perfectly aware of the midwife's unlucky demise, having heard the healer's scream and her foe's screeching cackle, too late to even think of help. No soldier forgets the sound of steel, and all Gerudo recognize the electric discharge of the Lizalfos. Neither had the corpse's discovery and the subsequent investigations gone unnoticed. The desert patrols are not known for their stealth, after all, the site of the killing was nearby, and the mother was a skilled practitioner of magic in her own right. Besides, the Town was aware of her advanced pregnancy. She had been sent a midwife, and the Town would never allow her child to be raised entirely beyond supervision, no matter their opinion on the circumstances of her birth. We share the mother's happiness as the saying goes.
The same spells that had notified her of the patrol's discovery gave her early warning of the visitors' plans. The more she pondered the questions prompted by her baby, the more her thoughts turned to suspicion. The mother was not a practicing scholar, like the midwife had been, but she had traveled widely and learned much. Spells of silence, for example, were often underestimated by Gerudo warriors that preferred the ostentatious thunder of pitched battle, and who disdained the Sheikah as compensating for weakness. Enchanted sleep was held in similar disregard. Although magic could not fill one's belly, there were also spells that could distract the mind from hunger, often useful on long marches. Thinking quickly, she reached out into the lingering magic left from the midwife's visit, added her own, and cast that triple magic (silence, sleep, satiety) upon her babe. Lacking other options, she opened the one fine box she owned, and laid the placid child in among her weapons.
The mother was, however, surprised when her visitors did not stop to request entrance. But when she saw who had stormed in, the surprise was replaced with new suspicion, dawning fear, and not small pleasure. It was the Chief, accompanied by her captains, that had crossed the threshold. This was a woman that the mother knew, from long acquaintance, would never stand on ceremony. They had been fellow recruits, contemporaries in the Town barracks, and later dedicated partners on the field of battle. The Chief was a good, strong woman, one who had in fact never laid down arms and was therefore without heir. Could she be persuaded to support this exceptional boy? She was a lover of tradition, but tended to scoff at men's folly even more forcefully than the other Gerudo. The mother made a snap decision, that the latter was too great a risk, that the exception was too odd, that the Chief's great pride might be displeased. And so when she was asked about the midwife, and the delivery, the mother broke down in tears. There had been no room to let her stay, she said, but she had not even had the chance to offer—not when the midwife had fled in despair, horrified to have overseen a miscarriage. Her old friend embraced her; they wept together.